West Seattle Bridges

Will at the Slog has a piece up today that makes me angry – so angry I’m posting from Portland, where I was trying to have a nice vacation. Will is blaming Sound Transit for not having a ready-made light rail plan for a mayor who hasn’t even yet taken office when the plan doesn’t even have a scope yet!

This seems to display ignorance of a system that we’ve been working for years to help people understand.

Sound Transit gets a certain amount of money each year, from sales taxes and MVET. They write a budget based on how much they’re expecting, and publish it. Usually, there’s some wiggle room – as projects are completed, surpluses are sometimes released, and there are funds available for unexpected administrative or legal expenses.

In the past – maybe last year, or the year before – Sound Transit might have been able to take on a planning project like determining alignment for West Seattle or Ballard light rail – a $12 million study. But Sound Transit is receiving less in sales tax revenue this year than they’d budgeted for, meaning they’re looking to cut costs wherever they can, not accelerating projects. Sound Transit’s plan for ST2 shows light rail planning for these corridors to be budgeted in 2015 – and it’s been that way since the Proposition 1 election in 2008.

Furthermore, no plan – not even a scope – has been released by the mayor-elect’s office (possibly because he’s not actually the mayor yet). No plan – or again, even a scoping document – has been released by Richard Conlin’s office. As far as I’m aware, no request has been made to Sound Transit by those offices or any other for light rail planning in these corridors.

During McGinn’s campaign, I urged his staff to talk to him about making light rail to West Seattle and Ballard a priority. I’m overjoyed that he’s doing it, and I look forward to that planning taking place – but there’s nothing for Sound Transit to do here. Even if they could find a way to fund a study (and don’t hold your breath), they’d have to know what to study within some range between streetcar and subway, and have some idea of how they’re going to pay for it. The ball is in the mayor-elect’s court to figure out what he wants. The Slog’s piece today is Sound Transit bashing at its worst.

Sloggers – you know better than this.

Sen. Haugen (Senate Democrats)

Gas tax revenues, an important part of how we fund highways, have been declining along with fuel consumption.  Officials wondering how to plug the gap have floated the idea of “vehicle miles traveled” tax, which would basically charge you for each mile of road you use.

Andrew Austin reports that Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margaret Haugen (D-Camano Island) has declared that idea dead for now.   And that’s good news.

The point of a VMT tax is that it raises revenue while discouraging driving.  But consider:

• A gas tax also discourages driving.
• A gas tax encourages use of fuel-efficient vehicles
• A gas tax requires no new bureaucracy to implement.
• A gas tax does not require the government to track your movements with a transponder.  I’m not really into tinfoil hats but this seems unnecessarily intrusive.

It may be that the revenue isn’t adequate, but there’s a simple solution: raise the gas tax.  It may be that in the far future most vehicles won’t burn gasoline.  But I’m not holding my breath, and we can address that problem if and when it occurs.

On a related note, USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood agrees with me.  More on the meeting that spurred this comment after the jump. (more…)

Pioneer Square Station entrance - thanks to Mike Bjork

Like the rest of our transit agencies and government bodies, Sound Transit also faces some 20% shortfall in sales tax revenue (and a hit to their MVET, as well).

Over the next 15 years, that equates to a drop of $3.1 billion in cumulative revenue for the agency. (By that time, revenue will be long stable again, it doesn’t add anything to look farther ahead.)

Today Sound Transit was kind enough to give Mike Lindblom and me a briefing on what this means for Sound Transit 2 projects, and the resulting news is pretty good: the padding Sound Transit had in ST2 is actually about the same as the revenue shortfall.

Sound Transit will be value-engineering everything to create new padding inside their shrunken revenue – they’re trying to ensure they don’t ride the edge of their budget for the next 15 years. Among other plans for cost savings, they also identified several places where expenditures that were planned to be immediate may not happen immediately – like matching funds provided if an operator wants to build something on the BNSF Eastside track. They’ve gotten unexpected grants lately, interest rates have been low, and bids have come under budget.

The big thing to take away is that Sound Transit showed us an aggressive plan that should keep ST2 projects on schedule. Given the last eight years of project delivery, I’m inclined to believe they can do it.

Kurt Triplett

I want to dive into these some more later, but for now, both the Seattle and King County executives have released their 2010 budget plans.  In both cases, these budgets will be overseen by a new executive.

Anyway, the City’s six-year Capital Improvement Program (CIP) .pdf is most interesting for the beginnings of a tunnel funding plan.  It’s not crystal-clear from the document, but  Scott Gutierrez says $600m of the $930m City responsibility is programmed, and some of it would use the same City MVET authority that Mike McGinn hopes to dedicate to building light rail.

At the County level, Kurt Triplett released his  Transportation Budget (pdf).  There are no huge surprises for anyone who read our series on Triplett’s Metro plan.

I speculated that the audit might point out some savings that could avoid some of the originally scheduled cuts.  However, the suggested audit savings were either extremely unpalatable, or positioned a few years into the future.  Thus, there was no change to the previously proposed 310,000 hours of suspensions over the next two years.  These suspensions amount to a 5% cut from a baseline of the planned service level in 2010-11, and therefore are smaller cut from the 2009 service level.  The other 4% from the Triplett plan’s headline 9% cut come in 2012 and 2013, and may be avoided thanks to audit savings.

Two other exciting tidbits:

• $34m for a RapidRide “F” line (Burien, Tukwila Link, Southcenter, Tukwila Sounder, S. Renton P&R,  Renton TC).  (see page 33) Design work to start in 2011.  Previously planned lines are A (Pacific Hwy S), B (NE 8th St, Bellevue/Redmond), C (West Seattle), D (Ballard), and E (Aurora).  I’ll post more when I get it.
• $5.5m to get ORCA readers for all doors on all Metro coaches (p.25), greatly speeding loading and unloading.

The next step for both budgets is to be deliberated on by the respective councils.

King County Executive Kurt Triplett announcing Metro funding increases. Photo from West Seattle Blog.

RapidRide will be saved, announced interim King County Executive Kurt Triplett. Triplett announced plans today to use recent legislative authority to create a transit share of property taxes of 5.5 cents, while cutting other levies to make the plan tax neutral.

“This five-and-a-half cents for Metro Transit would provide 23,000 additional passenger trips a day on our most heavily used corridors during a time when overall bus ridership has jumped 20%,” the Executive said in a press release. This would amount to about $18m a year for Metro, compared with a structural deficit of about $100m a year.

The legislature granted property taxing authority of 7.5 cents per $1000 of assessed value for public transit. The legislature also allowed for enactment of an MVET, but the Governor vetoed that portion of the bill.

Funding would be used primarily to save the beleaguered RapidRide bus rapid transit network that Metro is planning to roll out over the coming years. Failing to deliver on RapidRide could have been politically infeasible given that the 2006 Transit Now! measure campaigned heavily on the idea of rapid, frequent, and fast RapidRide service servicing the fastest growing areas in King County. That measure that increased Metro’s sales tax authority by 0.1% to a maxed-out 0.9%.

The legislature mandated that a portion of the property taxing authority must be dedicated to SR-520 service. Metro is receiving millions in urban partnership funds to buy new buses for the 520 corridor, but no money from those grants fund bus service. Tolls are set to begin along span next year.

Since all of this funding will be used to fund RapidRide and SR-520 service, this additional revenue may not help avoid deep service cuts. Triplett said he will announce a plan next week that will outline the expected deep service cuts and perhaps fare increases. Last November, the King County Council approved a 50-cent fare hike that will finish phasing in next January. It’s hard to say how much more fare riders can stand to pay, particularly without some sort of hardship or poverty exemption.

Read on for more details after the jump…

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Committee Chair Dow Constantine (kuow.org)

The last agenda item in the June 17 Regional Transit Commitee meeting was a review of Metro’s financial policies.  The report itself (.doc) was even more boring than it sounds, but there were some interesting comments and ideas from the committee afterwards.

The much-publicized $105m Revenue Fleet Replacement Sub-fund surplus could fund Metro’s deficit through the end of 2010.  Committee members seemed to latch on to that as meaning they could avoid any pain, but of course it merely postpones the day of reckoning.  Metro service volume will not recover to 2008 levels for the better part of a decade barring a permanent new source of revenue, as Chair Dow Constantine pointed out:

It is remarkable how much you can throw in, in terms of money transferred from fleet replacement, in terms of new revenues, and still not make a huge dent in the number of service hours we’re faced with potentially having to cut.

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The Stranger recently wrote about seven things they learned when they rode light rail for the first time. The last one caught my eye – we need to speed this up.

There’s a big shrug from Sound Transit about accelerating University Link or Northgate – we can’t do much without immediate infusions of hundreds of millions of dollars, and I keep hearing they’re already working on a Northgate acceleration plan. But we can definitely do something about ST2’s other components. We could speed up Lynnwood, Federal Way, or Redmond extensions with more cash in the next few years, and we could accelerate planning for a new line in the city. This is why we’re starting to try to talk about new funding sources.

At the national level, there’s not much. There’s pressure on the Federal Transit Administration to improve their New Starts grant process, but we’re all here in Seattle, where it’s tough to have an impact in DC. It makes more sense to me to fight for new funding at the local level – we’re going to have to go to the state, and that’s a tough task on its own.

The options that stuck out for me are the basics:

• State or local MVET using a smarter approach than the tables the state used to use.
• Local option property taxes, both at a city level and through LIDs.

Were there other obvious funding sources I missed? I know there are lots of other options, but these seem like they’d be the easiest. Sound Transit already collects some MVET for Sound Move, but they won’t be able to continue using that revenue after the bonds are repaid, probably around 2023. Would that be a good place to start? How about allowing local voters to double it?

With Transit Now and Sound Transit 2, both Metro and Sound Transit have capped out what sales tax they’re allowed to ask for – when we extend light rail again, we’re going to need a new source of income to pay for it. There are lots of options: A new MVET, tolls, part of the gas tax, a carbon tax, even a property tax. None of these are available unless authorized by the state legislature.

This won’t just be a matter of asking nicely. The Governor vetoed the option of a local vehicle license fee for transit. Chair and Vice-Chair of Senate Transportation, Senators Mary Margaret Haugen and Chris Marr, respectively, sent this letter (link removed due to a technical issue, email us if you want it) to the Governor requesting the veto. Essentially, the chairs would like local option taxes to be on the table for other “transportation modes” – like, say, highways.

The state has had little will to increase gas tax past the 2005 9.5c package, and with driving down, they’re left with a huge backlog of underfunded highway projects. They’re looking increasingly to local government to fill some of those gaps – local government that lost access to the MVET a decade ago.

This is a multi-decade trend. Transportation project funding has been shifting from primarily federal to primarily state, and now local – I can only speculate as to why, but the recent RTID package was another manifestation of the larger government failing to build the political will to fund projects, and passing the buck down to the local level. I think this letter, and the Governor’s action, is another sign that we’ll be asked to fund highways locally once again.

The problem, of course, is that at the local level and the state level, we seem to have different aims. Voters in the city want to build mass transit and increasingly a streetcar network, and want relief for overcrowded buses. Sidewalks are getting wider, excess parking is frowned upon, density in the city is slowly going up.

The state hasn’t caught up to this thinking. There is still a belief in Olympia that a wider highway will decrease congestion – there’s still a belief that congestion is something you can decrease! So several billion goes into infrastructure for cars, and virtually nothing goes into infrastructure for people.

So what do we want the next state budget to look like? What funding options do we want to build our next rail line in the city? And how do we get there? If enough of us start talking to our legislators, we can make it clear that our next transportation budget needs to look very different, but what is it that we want to say?

By the Author

The 42 and 42X are the two routes, along with the 194, that most closely duplicate Central Link. The 42X will be eliminated and the 42 will be dramatically scaled back in route length, service headways, and service span.

The 42 is basically being retained as a shuttle for the Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) so that they have a door-to-door connection to downtown. They cared enough about transit access to send a bunch of people to the County Council meeting to demand their very special bus line, but not enough to design their brand-new building so that it actually faced the light rail station, or even the nearest bus stop.  It has plenty of parking, though.

[UPDATE: Tipper Carl points out that ACRS is so transit-oriented that on the very same webpage, it says to find out about bus service to the Bellevue location by calling Community Transit.  Heh.]

The 42 is also infamous as the route where, until recently, you could get your next hit of crack.  Even more infamously, it’s a route I take almost every day.  Elsewhere in the world:

• Joe Biden says intercity rail funds are on the way.  Checks should go out by the end of the summer. (H/T: Gordon)
• In other Biden news, he and Sec. LaHood met Wednesday with selected State Governors and transportation officials.  Washington was not on the list.
• STB Hero Geoff Simpson (D-Covington) is upset at the Governor’s veto of the MVET authorization.
• The Rail Passenger Association of California and Nevada is concerned that deteriorating rolling stock could force a halt to many Southern and Western Amtrak routes.  As Cascades has its own trainsets, it ought not to be affected. (H/T: Lloyd)
• Transit planners ask Congress to fix New Starts Funding, since FTA rules routinely force agencies to lowball ridership estimates.  For all the doubters, those rules were used to generate Link ridership estimates.

Link Light Rail vehicles are 70% low floor. All four of the doors on each side are at the same level as the platform, only a short portion at each end is raised. This means there will be no waiting for wheelchairs to board, as they can roll right on, and no trouble for those who have difficulty climbing steps.

Ten weeks left!

I also want to make a comment about SB 5433 – the bill that modifies local option taxes this year. Just to recap, it allows for two new things: Cities and counties can now ask the public to vote for a congestion charge on car tabs to fund transit, although unlike the MVET this would be flat, rather than based on the value of the car. The bill also changes property tax rules.

Right now, without this bill, the King County Council can vote, without the public, to increase property taxes for ferries from today’s $0.075/$1000 to a total of $0.75/$1000. 5433 makes two changes – it reduces the total allowance  to $0.15/$1000, and it reserves the currently uncollected $0.075/$1000 for transit.

The Governor hasn’t signed this bill yet, and openly anti-Sound Transit Joe Turner has some incorrect reporting on the matter. He claims this is a new tax. Taxes are clearly not his motivation – this reduces the amount of tax the County Council can impose. This would be a good time to call or email the Governor’s office in support of SB 5433, as it will take a big bite out of King County Metro’s shortfall – and save routes we use.

With about five days to go before the end of the legislative session, there’s plenty more we can do to help.

Since the loss of the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (MVET), many transit agencies have hurt for revenue – and today that hurt is double due to huge falls in sales tax. This year we may have two new options, but only if we tell our legislators we want them!

The first is a transportation benefit district, that would allow transit agencies and municipalities to ask for (yes, ask, this would require a public vote) a $20 car tab – not based on value, just flat. The second would allow King County to use some of our existing ferry district revenue, which is much higher than our ferry needs, for transit. This would fill $30 million of Metro’s $100 million budget hole.

In the House, Representative Simpson was able to add an amendment (PDF) to SB 5433 (“Modifying provisions of local option taxes”) to do these things, but the Senate did not concur. This is normal, it just means that the bill has to go into conference committee.

As this would greatly benefit King County, I’m hoping to see Senator Jarrett take a supportive position on the bill as passed by the House.

This would also be a great time to take a moment to call your legislators to support these tools to prevent transit service cuts! Here’s the District Finder tool, as well as the legislative hotline, 1-800-562-6000 (8am-8pm).

This is slightly outside the realm of transit, but is definitely transportation related. As you probably already know, in the US we drive very large cars that use a lot of fuel. Venturing outside of the North America, one of the first things you might notice about cars is how few very large SUVs you see and how many more very small, so-called “mini-cars” you see. A variety of taxes on cars and fuel encourage large vehicles while discouraging smaller ones in the United States, at a cost of pollution and a massive send off of American treasure to oil exporting nations. With the US auto industry effectively in Federal receivership, it’s the best possible time for reform of our auto industry, and the laws that give incentive to large vehicles

Below the fold I’ll mention three ways the government could encourage lower fuel consumption or encourage smaller vehicles.

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State Capitol Building, Olympia

So State House Speaker Frank Chopp may want to take a billion or two from Sound Transit. What’s new? The legislature has been going after Sound Transit money for years now, and this is just the latest attempt in a long line of attempts. I’ve been writing about the state’s transportation funding troubles for two years now, and much of this story will be familiar to long-time readers. Whole history (as I see it) below the fold.

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New sales tax forecasting from Sound Transit has indicated that their $17.8 billion transit expansion project passed by voters last fall now faces a $2.1 billion funding gap because of the deepening recession. Sound Transit is funded by a 0.4% sales tax (increaseing to 0.9% on April 1st) and an MVET on car purchases. Consumer spending and car purchases fell significantly as America entered into its worst recession in recent memory.

Sound Transit says that it has been conservative in its budgeting and may be able to make up some money with a variety of tools “including cost and scope control, taking advantage of the lower borrowing costs, and a more positive bid environment for our construction projects.” Earlier this year a contract was awarded for light rail to the U District that fell 34% below ST’s estimates. The poor economy has also dampened the effects of inflation that had been built into ST cost estimates.

Sound Transit is not currently planning on any changes to the construction plans but awknowledged that if revenues continue to fall and the recession deepens they may have to “also look at budget reductions, schedule adjustments, and increased bonding.” Pete Rogness, an ST staff member briefing the Sound Transit Board Finance Committee, said that delaying construction or implementation of some of the projects was “very much a last resort.”

It’s a shame to see something we all worked so hard to pass immediately be affected by the recession, but it’s also not surprising. Every level of government that depends on taxing revenues is seeing major drops in their collections. The ST2 plan creates about 69,000 jobs across all sectors — which is reason enough to keep things on track. Thus, an increased federal role in transportation spending would be even more useful in an environment like this.

The Seattle PI has more coverage.

Metro Buses Queued in the Tunnel, Photo by Oran

One of the topics current King County Council Member Larry Phillips discussed in the Q&A that we had with him last week at our meet-up was the possibility of finding future funding sources for King County’s Metro. Metro, like many other state and local agencies, faces a massive budget crisis and may be forced to cut service in order to make up the future revenue deficit. Metro is without any way to raise new money: Metro, along with Snohomish’s Community Transit has currently reached its state-allowed limit on its taxing authority: nine-tenths of one percent sales tax collection. Even if the people of King County wanted to tax themselves to provide more bus service, state law wouldn’t allow them to.

At first it seems bizarre that Olympia wouldn’t allow voters to tax themselves to provide more bus service, but it makes a little sense when you think about it. Until very recently, no transit agency had reached the nine-tenths of a percent allocation, and before I-695 passed in 1999, these agencies were allowed to collect the motor vehicle excise tax (MVET). And it’s only now that any transit agency has faced a potential service cut.

Phillips mentioned two additional funding sources Metro could potentially go after if the state allowed. The first is the MVET that Ron Sims was pushing around the time the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel plan was announced. The second option would be to allow some or all of the taxing authority given to county ferry districts – a property tax of 75¢ per $1000 assessed value – to be used for transit by the voter’s approval. The MVET has been a wildly unpopular tax, and attempting to use that for transit might be a disaster, but the property tax seems reasonable.

Currently the King County Ferry District collects 5.5¢ per $1000 assessed value, worth a little more  more than $18 million a year for King County, and it looks like the Ferry District in King County couldn’t ever need the entire 75¢. There are counties where ferries are crucial transportation connections, such as Island County, where state Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margarett Haugen (D-Camano Island) lives, and they may use the whole allotment. But doesn’t it make sense for the state to allow counties to use that 75¢ taxing authority on any transportation project they need? King County may not want a lot of ferries, but the voters may decide they could use more roads, buses or rail. The ability to implement a levy to build a specific project or pass a permanent tax increase to fund transit service seems like something the voters should have the right to do. Fortunately there is a bill going through Olympia right now that would enable exactly this: letting the county use some of the ferry taxing authority for transit.

The transportation leaders in Olympia, Rep. Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island) and Sen Haugen among others, have made it very clear that they expect the Greater Seattle area and it’s outlying communities to fund their own transportation improvements. The state relies nearly entirely on gas tax revenue to fund roads proejcts, and with people driving less, choosing more efficient cars and taking transit more, the revenues are far short of paying for all the needs across the state. That’s one of the main reasons why they pushed RTID, the now-defunct regional roads agency, so heavily and why they are fighting for “governance reform”, also known as stealing transit money to pay for roads. If Olympia expects Seattle and its neighbors to solve their own transportation problems, it needs to stop trying to push their preferred plans down onto us. I would have hoped in light of Prop. 1 first failing by a large margin with roads and transit and then passing by an even larger margin with just transit, Olympia would realize the voters here don’t agree with their vision of what our region’s transportation system should look like. Instead, they ought to provide tools to the local governments here, and allow the voters to approve the transportation plans that they want in their own communities. The 75¢ per $1000 property tax set aside for ferries seems like great tool for this purpose.

Amtrak Cascades, by Stephen Rees

• Amtrak is working to get a second train to BC, but is getting the run-around from the Canadian Government. The Canadians want to charge $1500 a day for customs and immigration services for the train, and while that might not sound like a lot, Amtrak does not have a massive budget and doesn’t want to pay the fee. You’d think the Canadians would see the benefits of the additional tourism dollars, especially with the Olympics coming, but so far no progress has been made in getting the fee waived..
• The P-I mentions that the state legislature is becoming a major hurdle in getting an MVET to pay for the increased bus service that King County wanted as a part of the viaduct construction. With Ron Sims in DC, who’ll fight for it?
• The PI also takes a jab at the 20-40-40 rule in discussing a Municipal League Report that argued for Metro to take a serious look at its finances.
  

  Metro will also have to “squeeze every ounce of productivity and service out of limited resources.” That will require re-examining a highly political formula that has been designating most new service for far-flung, low ridership suburbs. It should also bring much more serious attention to labor costs.

  Well put. I agree its remarkable that Metro hasn’t yet cut service.

• As Publicola notes, Maria Cantwell voted against the ill-conceived auto-purchase “stimulus” amendment, but worked to get an electric car amendment onto the bill.
• This is sort of a sad story of a woman who was forced to move from her home to make way for the Capitol Hill light rail station. It isn’t like she didn’t get paid a fair price for her house, or have it come as a surprise, since Sound Transit notified her more than 10 years ago.
• The argument against transportation spending.

Patty Murray, by Ben Schiendelman

• Gregoire says that the motor vehicle excise tax (MVET) is not needed to build the viaduct replacement tunnel. This will likely make a lot of people happy, since the MVET tends to be extremely unpopular for some reason, but it makes me very unhappy, since that money was supposed to go to transit service.
• Patty Murray and Diane Feinstein are pushing a measure through the US Senate that will increase the amount of infrastructure funding in the Senate version of the stimulus bill. Currently, the Senate version has significant less infrastructure, and especially transit spending, than the version the house passed last week. If the amendment passes, it’s virtually gauranteed that the stimulus bill will have more than $13 billion in transit spending. The Senate version is expected to be larger than the $819 billion House version was, due to the large number of amendments.
• As you have probably heard, Ron Sims is going to DC to be the deputy director of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sims has been King County Exec since 1996, and was probably read for a new job. In the mean time, the County Council will select a replacement. Sims is a good fit for this position, and will do a great job.
• The feeling outside North King County? Toll both the 520 bridge and the I-90 bridge to pay for 520 construction.
• This is why double decker buses need to stick to their route.

We’re late on this, but Seattlest contributor Brad took the recent Department of Licensing MVET goof to its logical conclusion and pointed out that there’s probably been a hiccup in sales tax collection as well, one that potentially dwarfs the $3 million involved in the MVET program.  Assuming his facts are right, it’s a good point, but one that probably doesn’t have a lot of practical implications.

The only thing I have to add is that there are 95,000 vehicle owners affected by the MVET, which is probably roughly the number of adults in the affected areas.  A 0.4% sales tax figures to cost the median adult about $55 a year and has been collected for 12 years.  That comes out to about $62 million, but that assumes that those relatively rural areas have the same median income as the area as a whole; assumes residents do no shopping in the district proper; and ignores inflation over the past decade.  I think it’s safe to say that the total impact is something substantially less than that figure, so loose talk about “hundreds of millions” is probably not correct.

Given these uncertainties, and other practical difficulties Brad himself points out, I don’t see a practical remedy as simple as that for MVET.  I think sloppy state agencies deserve scolding, as well as legislators who made the district boundary as complicated as possible.  But a figure in the low tens of millions of dollars is serious money, enough to do a freeway ramp or other practical project.  I’d rather use that money to build a project they participated in the vote for than attempt to reconstruct 12 years of purchase records.

But, of course, I would say that.

Photo, taken somewhere East of Sammamish, by Panoramio contributor franklin18136.

I just want to point something out here. This is barely worth a post, but I don’t think anyone’s considered the cost-benefit perspective here.

King County has or will spend something over a hundred million dollars replacing and upgrading their computer systems, if I’m not mistaken. The state Department of Revenue might be smaller than the county, but let’s consider what the alternatives actually are here.

The state collects billions in revenue each year. To replace that computer system would likely mean buying an entirely new system, running them both in parallel and cross-checking the results of any number of different types of collection by hand – and this for at least a year. Such a contract could be astronomical in cost – and during a time when the state needs to cut costs by five or six billion dollars.

So, three million dollars? While it sounds like a lot, I think having this happen and then repaying it is likely much cheaper for everyone.

The 0.3% MVET that Sound Transit collects when registering vehicle tabs was accidentally collected for those living just outside of the Sound Transit district, the P-I reports:

More than $3 million in Sound Transit motor-vehicle excise taxes was wrongly collected from about 95,000 vehicle owners who lived outside the agency’s taxing district due to shortcomings of a computer program at a state agency, court testimony shows.

The taxes, which will be returned in the form of refunds, were collected between June 30, 2005, and July 1 of this year, according to court testimony by Sound Transit’s Chief Financial Officer Brian McCartan.

This is truly an embarrassing and unfortunate situation for Sound Transit to find itself in. To be clear, though, state agencies like the Department of Revenue and Department of Licensing are the ones who collect these taxes and presumably determine who should pay them — not ST. Sound Transit’s mission is to build transit and not collect taxes, after-all. All agencies at this point, however, should be working together to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future. I’m glad everyone seems to be moving forward quickly with a refund to those who were wrongly charged the MVET.

Silver lining? Not to be flippant, but thank goodness this didn’t break before the election!